Duran Lantink on his rule-breaking Jean Paul Gaultier debut

Jean Paul Gaultier SS2026 collection by Duran Lantink — All clothing by Jean Paul Gaultier. Enquire at jeanpaulgaultier.com (Image credit: Photography by Clark Franklyn, fashion by Jason Hughes)

In these tightly corseted times, how do you build on a legacy bursting with nudity, sexuality and provocation? Duran Lantink faced this very challenge 12 months ago, when he took up residence on the top floor of Jean Paul Gaultier’s ex-ribbon factory, ex-boxing gym, ex-nightclub Paris HQ as the label’s new creative director. Arriving with a whiff of the enfant terrible after a solid six-year run of mischievous ready-to-wear collections under his own name, the Dutch designer was well primed to arouse both criticism and adulation.

The opening look of his debut S/S 2026 collection for Gaultier, held in Paris this past October, yanked the iconography of Madonna’s cone bra through a funhouse media landscape until it emerged like an extraterrestrial slap. The house’s iconic inked body sleeves were now in three dimensions. Trench coats were sliced; the sailor stripes of the house’s torso-shaped Le Male fragrance bottle elongated and warped. Tops clung to the body with telephone receiver-shaped clasps. Lantink wasn’t delivering a polite, earnest homage: as soon as the livestream cut, talking head videos quickly began circulating online with commentators wondering if what he’d shown was a simple case of rage-baiting. In their animated search for meaning, fashion fans were left picking through the debris of an industry they had held onto through fuzzy VHS tapes of 1990s shows and pages scanned from glossy millennial magazines.

In an age when even the dullest algorithm could stitch together a decent Gaultier fantasy from nautical uniforms, conical bras and tattooed mesh, Lantink’s decision to turn away from the archives was fittingly rebellious. Speaking to Vogue after the show, Gaultier himself said: ‘I was only smelling the spirit of the time. And this is what it is to be a designer: not to analyse too much, but to visually receive.’ Lantink isn’t trolling. He’s playful. He’s puckish. And he really knows how to prick at the glossy surface of an archival impulse.

Dal Chodha: Why do you think everyone was so freaked out about your debut?

Duran Lantink: I knew that criticism would be coming, but not necessarily in the way that it happened. There are many aspects of Jean Paul Gaultier that people hold onto, but I’m not here to please every single one of them. I’m here to bring my vision, my own story. There are different ways of respecting the legacy of Gaultier, and I thought it might have been obvious that I wasn’t going to open the archive from the get-go.

DC: A video of one of your namesake collections on Instagram has some 30 million views and thousands of hate comments. You said you were pleased that you had managed to at least make people feel something. How do you feel about this public court of opinion now that you are at Jean Paul Gaultier?

DL: It’s good that there’s conversation, but I’ve realised that I’m on a bigger platform now and so the reactions become louder. All the commentary becomes a bigger force. I understand that people thought it was weird I had not been into the archives, but for me, from the very start, Jean Paul Gaultier was reacting to what was happening around him. That was something I was trying to grasp, to express the energy of today. The collection was named ‘Junior’ after the Junior Gaultier line, which ran between 1988-1994. I was looking at this Junior Gaultier horned beanie hat that I was given on my 12th birthday and how amazing it made me feel when I wore it to school. I was also remembering the house parties my parents had when I was a kid; they made me understand that you can dress up during the night and become somebody else. I really wanted to dig into that feeling.

DC: Isn’t there a nostalgia in the way you’re thinking about clubbing in the 1990s? Was the nightlife you were imagining for this collection one belonging to 2026?

DL: Even though it came from a memory, it was very much inspired by today and the freedom you can enjoy when you’re part of the night. In the show, we had the guy wearing the blue backpack suit, which for me was very much a reference to Whole Festival in Germany, where they all like being naked, just wearing a fanny pack and a pair of sneakers. I liked that idea of accessories as clothing pieces. I get excited about these raves or places where people are being free.

‘I’m trying to break free of what’s considered good taste or how we think we should look. I want people to come to Jean Paul Gaultier with an open mind, to expect propositions that might not be common’
Duran Lantink

DC: There’s this broader sense, though, that young people don’t go out anymore, that they might be socialising in different ways beyond warehouses and clubs. Do you believe this is happening?

DL: I don’t have that much time to go out myself at the moment, but I feel that sound is one of the most important forms of art. Rave culture is very much based on music and dancing and so, even though people say that young people aren’t going out anymore and are staying home, I don’t think that’s sustainable! Finding spaces where you can feel free is important, and natural. For me, it was always raves, but maybe the function of the rave has turned into something new. Music has formed a large part of how I respond to fashion, and style. I’ve been so obsessed with sound lately.

DC: Artist John Giorno’s cut-up poems formed the soundtrack to your show. There’s something about the collaging and chopping up of those tracks that relates to how you were looking at the heritage of Gaultier. You’ve drawn on the public archives – the things that Jean Paul Gaultier has given popular culture – rather than the physical collection archives, but still, your offer was a shock to people.

DL: There were loads of Gaultier references, but it was like trying to break a stick and do something that felt more urgent. What did people think I was going to be doing? I understood the reaction to what I was proposing, but I didn’t foresee the upset about the body suit depicting a hairy naked man’s body. Even though the silicone tops of a man’s six-pack and a pair of breasts at my last collection generated a lot of commotion, I was surprised that people reacted to this. What’s wrong with seeing a naked male body? If I saw anyone walking around wearing that, I would think they were a great person!

DC: Are you also trying to get us to think more about censorship or the rise in conservatism? That’s what your work seems to throw up for me. People are easily provoked and think what you’re doing is in bad taste, or it’s not romantic enough.

DL: We are living in a world where everything is super direct and definitely not that romantic, so I’m reflecting on what I’m seeing and how we are living today. If you’re constantly thinking, ‘OK, is this a smart move?’ or ‘How would people react? Should we tone that down a bit?’ then I think you become very limited in what you can say.

DC: Are you an enfant terrible?

DL: I am honoured that Monsieur Gaultier gave me that title right before my show, but I don’t know what an enfant terrible is. I guess people might say that about me because every time I’ve done something lately, it seems to open up a conversation, and people have different feelings about it, and become outraged about certain things. That links to the spirit of the enfant terrible, I suppose. I always feel like what I’m doing is playful.

DC: It’s not provocative?

DL: To a genuinely provocative person, I’m not provocative, but for somebody who is more conservative, I guess I am. But I am not looking for provocation.

DC: You said that you didn’t want to put jeans and a T-shirt on the runway. The fashion show is meant to be a moment. Are you asking us to go back to this idea of the show as a message or a mood first?

DL: Ready-to-wear shows are based within a commercial context, but there are these fast-fashion machines that are so big and so quick that, within three weeks, you can find a version of what you’ve shown on the high street. It was interesting to challenge this and think, ‘OK, try to copy this!’ because they would never be able to do that with most of what we showed. The show was kind of breaking free of a machine that’s eating us up constantly. It was also a challenge of what we consider ‘normal’ and ‘commercial’. Jean Paul Gaultier’s shows were always about setting a certain type of mood or posing a question. I want to present things and let them sink in.

DC: What conversations has this collection opened up for you personally?

DL: Mostly they’ve been about how much people are lately drawn to this idea of a wardrobe rather than a new proposition. Everybody’s feeling confident because they own this idea of quiet luxury with a polyester coat. There seems to be this sense that, once it becomes too abstract, it doesn’t become clothing anymore, which I think is ridiculous. As long as you can wear it and it doesn’t weigh 100kg and you can express yourself in a certain type of way, that’s clothes. That’s fashion. What I like so much about Jean Paul Gaultier is that he tapped into so many different subcultures that it gives me a very broad playground to translate into something that has interest today.

DC: What did you feel like you were responding to with this collection?People have made assumptions that this must be about gender or war or transness, but I don’t know if it’s about any of those things.

DL: That all exists in what I’ve been doing my whole life. I’m also trying to break free of what’s considered good taste or how we think we should look. My Gaultier is for somebody who embraces different characters within themselves. I want people to come to Gaultier with an open mind, to expect propositions that might not be common. For me, this collection was about the power of dressing up and not being seen. That’s something I find so liberating. In every person, there’s a certain type of unreleased eccentricity and I want to explore that more. People might disagree, but I think my clothes are beautiful. I’m not necessarily only trying to do or make things for image; I just think this looks nice, but I guess people are very divided by that. My idea of beautiful is somebody who is without fear. Clothes can be for hiding behind, fashion can do that, but I like it when a person is revealing themselves fully.

A version of this story appears in the March 2026 Style Issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News + now. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

Model: Addison Soens at Models 1. Casting: Lisa Dymph Megens at Industry Art. Hair: Delphine Bonnet using Oribe. Make-up: Marie Dufresne at Future Rep Manicure: Jessica Trochut. Local producer: Clara Perrotte. Photography assistants: Louis Niermans, Anna Jebnoun. Fashion assistant: Jaime Butel. Projector tech: William Sabotier at ETC Onlyview.

London based writer Dal Chodha is editor-in-chief of Archivist Addendum — a publishing project that explores the gap between fashion editorial and academe. He writes for various international titles and journals on fashion, art and culture and is a contributing editor at Wallpaper*. Chodha has been working in academic institutions for more than a decade and is Stage 1 Leader of the BA Fashion Communication and Promotion course at Central Saint Martins. In 2020 he published his first book SHOW NOTES, an original hybrid of journalism, poetry and provocation.

With contributions from

Clark Franklyn - Photography